Kiss My Bottom Line

Dec 05, 2007

Throughout the last decade, companies have told us that they want to be lean as well as green. The mad, bad days when corporations were only on about money and shareholders is over, they say. An aggressive corporate culture must be combined with community spirit; profit must not dominate the public interest. About time! But is it really happening?

To set the scene, New Internationalist co-editor Jess Worth went to a $5,500-per-ticket corporate conference on corporate social responsibility. She walks us through the talk of the high-flyers of the corporate world who she met there.

Mark Hays - from Corporate Accountability International in Boston - drops into our airwaves with an overview of what's happening in the tobacco and water industries. He tells us how the industry players are shaping government policies in ways that are dangerous to the public interest.

From England, John Hilary - the director of campaigns and policy with War on Want - and from Hong Kong, Apo Leong - who works with the Asia Monitor Resource Center - compare campaigning notes about what works, and what doesn't, in holding corporate vandals and bullies accountable.

Africa meets Europe in the music that we've lined up throughout today's program as Saba who was born to an Ethiopian mother and an Italian father sings her way through the divide between the two continents in her debut Jidka (meaning 'The Line').